Despite the fact that the stream of consciousness technique occupies an important position in twentieth-century fiction, there is no general agreement as to where the method originated or what it really is. As Frederick J. Hoffman observes, “Writers and critics are both confused by the idea of ‘interior monologue,’ or the ‘stream of consciousness,’ as it is more familiarly known.”1 Elizabeth Drew says that the stream of consciousness technique was “invented by Dorothy Richardson.”2 Katharine F. Gerould remarks that Henry James “introduced the method into English fiction.”3 In an editorial note appended to the English edition of Edouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés, James Laughlin holds that Dujardin invented interior monologue.4 In making this statement, he is following the position taken by Dujardin in Le Monologue intérieur, in which he attempts to describe and define the method first used by him, he says, in Les Lauriers.

That the works of William Godwin, Sir Walter Scott, and to some degree James Fenimore Cooper contributed significantly to the patterns, structures, and plots of William Gilmore Simms' novels has been generally accepted. It has not been pointed out, however, that one of the shaping influences on his handling of character and situation within the framework these writers contributed was the drama of the English Renaissance and Restoration. Its influence on his diction and on the uninhibited gusto of his writing has been noted,1 and the assumption that his greatest comic character, Porgy, was a direct imitation of Shakespeare's Falstaff has been made frequently.2 However, an examination of Simms' methods of characterization in his seven connected Revolutionary romances3—his most serious and ambitious novelistic project—reveals that the British dramatists were his tutors in more than diction and that Porgy, rather than being an exception to Simms' usual practice in characterization, is actually in keeping with his method and has but superficial similarities to Falstaff.

Whether scholars and anthologists have assigned a precise date of composition to Terminus or not, the general impression has been that Emerson wrote the poem upon approaching old age. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson implied that it was written in the 'sixties:

In the month of December, 1866, I, returning from six months on a Western railroad, met my father in New York just setting out for his winter's journey to the West, and we spent the night together at the St. Denis Hotel. He read me some poems that he was soon to publish in his new volume, May Day, and among them Terminus. I was startled, for he, looking so healthy, so full of life and young in spirit, was reading his deliberate acknowledgment of failing forces and his trusting and serene acquiescence.

In the various studies of French Hellenism, attention has rarely been directed thus far to determining with exact precision where French travellers went in Greece.1 And yet their itineraries are often very revealing. This is particularly true of Gustave Flaubert. From his itinerary, not only may we know what he saw and what he chose to omit, but also we may divine the reasons for his choices. Their implications will allow us to establish one more facet of his place in nineteenth-century French Hellenism. Further, but within this broad framework, a closer study of the specific problems of his trip through the Pass of Thermopylæ and of his difficulties with its topography will permit us to begin evaluating his approach to the problems of Greek archæology, upon whose resolution so much of modern Hellenism has depended. In his life and works, Hellenism occupied an important place. From the first version of the Education sentimentale begun in 1843 to the final version of the Tentation de saint Antoine published in 1874, passages in his works frequently center about it; and his esthetics are profoundly imbued with the implications and conclusions which he drew, over the years, from his intimate study of ancient Greece. As one part of the total definition of his place in the movement, I am presenting here his itinerary, based upon the confusing data which he has left us,2 and, as a sample of his archaeological efforts, I am offering an elucidation of his complex notes on the Pass of Thermopylæ.

Seine Verehrung für Goethe hat Gustave Flaubert oft und gern kundgetan, sei es, daß er Zeitgenossen wie Dumas und Victor Hugo grundsätzlich nach ihrem Verständnis des deutschen Dichters beurteilt, sei es, daß er ganz selbstverständlich Goethe neben Homer, Rabelais und Shakespeare stellt, wenn er seine höchsten Vorbilder nennt.1

In the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, recent research has come upon twenty unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd. These letters were purchased from Charles Sessler, the Philadelphia bookseller, in August, 1925. They are presented here numbered according to their placement in the Library file (HM 49104929).

In his edition of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Ernest DeSelincourt published for the first time over thirty poems of Wordsworth's juvenilia.1 Among these he discovered three poems previously thought to be the work of Coleridge and long published under his name. In The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,2 these poems are entitled “Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chaunt” (I, 253), “Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side” (I, 349), and “Alcaeus to Sappho” (I, 353). Since the publication of Wordsworth's juvenilia, I have found three more poems in the works of Coleridge which DeSelincourt failed to note as also originally belonging to Wordsworth: “To Lesbia” (I, 60), “The Death of the Starling” (I, 61), and “Morienti Superstes” (I, 62); besides these, a conjecture may be made as to the authorship of a fourth, “Moriens Superstiti” (I, 61), for it is paired with a poem clearly belonging to Wordsworth.

The standard authorities on the bibliography of Samuel Johnson1 fail to mention one minor but interesting piece of journalism that has been ascribed, with some probability, to Johnson. This is the “Observations” appended to “A Letter from a French Refugee in America to his Friend a Gentleman in England”, in The Literary Magazine, or Universal Review, of June, 1756.

The current insistence upon a new poetic mythology to serve as a unifying reference frame for human experience and thought has recently provoked from Bertrand H. Bronson a brilliant defense of the eighteenth-century use of personified abstractions.1 Bronson properly recognizes in the eighteenth-century affection for personification a reflection of the emotional power lent to universals by the mathematicism that had created a sense of an ordered universe operating by simple and general laws. To the unity of this “view of the world so comprehensive and assured as to enable us to state common experience in general terms” he has opposed the fragmentary world of modern naturalism which requires expression by fragmentary concrete symbols. The neoclassicist conceived the norm to be the universal, which particulars struggle to fashion, and therefore he sought, in the highest forms of his art, to express himself in terms equally eternal and comprehensive as the laws of nature. Personification satisfied the desire for the grandeur of generality; “labored particularities” in themselves distract from the largeness of thought, for “great thoughts are always general.” Bronson's paper is salutary, for we have too long and too uncritically scorned what one modern critic has called “those allegorical capitals which the age affected.” We are indeed misguided in judging on the basis of our own responses, conditioned by our own civilization alone, that the personified abstraction was but a literary convention sterile of emotional force in the eighteenth century. And in relating personification to the emotional excitation the age received from the contemplation of a harmonious universe, Bronson has supplied us with the proper framework for a more nearly accurate reading of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines was one of the most popular romances of the seventeenth century. A lusty account of one man's extraordinary generative powers, the work published originally in 1668 went through thirty different issues, including six in English, three in French, one in Italian, four in Dutch, ten in German, and six in Danish.1 Its primary appeal lay probably in its salaciousness, for the tale is short, no longer than a single book of Gulliver's Travels, and its theme is simple. Surprisingly enough, up to the present no critics have perceived this theme, which may be expressed by the Biblical maxim, “In the multitude of people, is the king's honor.” There is no question that population is Neville's theme, but his purpose in treating it is more difficult to decide. Since The Isle of Pines is on the surface merely a display of pornographic primitivism, we cannot know whether it is intended as an allegorical essay on population problems or merely a travesty on contemporary schemes to increase population.

An inquiry into the sources of Massinger's tragicomedy The Emperour of the East (1632) is made difficult by the abundance and variety of historical literature which contains the principal elements of the plot. On the one hand, the ready availability of the story in Byzantine chronicles has led students of Massinger to search for the sources exclusively in the histories; on the other, the variety in the content of these has made selection virtually impossible, for though many of the histories provide long accounts of the story of Theodosius and Eudoxia, none contains all the details which Massinger introduced in his tragicomedy. As a result, various scholars have proposed interesting, though unsatisfactory, combinations. Langbaine refers his reader to no fewer than five histories; Coxeter, the first editor of the plays, selects the first two of the sources cited by Langbaine, namely Socrates and Theodoret, but he admits that there may be others; Mason, the next editor, repeats Coxe-ter's note; and Gifford in his standard edition is even more vague than his predecessors. But to balance his inconclusive remarks he appends a note provided by his friend Dr. Ireland offering as the main sources Cedrenus and Theophanes, principally because they include the quarrel of Theodosius and Eudoxia; and a second note, this one by Gilchrist, another literary friend, who hazards the opinion that Massinger based his plot on two passages in the Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Burton relates briefly the marriage of Eudoxia and the famous episode with the apple. All of these are unacceptable, however, as both singly and in their sum they leave out of account significant details present in the play. A more satisfactory study of the sources was produced in 1897 by Emil Koeppel, whose conclusions were confirmed three years later by Wolfgang von Wurzbach.

The problem we are proposing to discuss is the result of a peculiar carelessness of Montaigne in his chapter on Friendship in his Essais, Book I, 28. He begins by noting that a painter,1 commissioned by him to decorate some of the large panels of his study with pictures, daubs fanciful designs, “crotesques”, around the central pieces. So, remarks Montaigne, his thoughts here are mere figures without any other purpose than to enshrine a great piece composed by his friend, Etienne de la Boétie. This gem is a little essay called by its author Discours de la servitude volontaire, but soon renamed Le contr'un by those who read it. Montaigne then relates that it was written by La Boétie in his early youth (later specified as eighteen) and circulated among appreciative readers who relished its spirited defence of liberty against tyrants. Hence the name of Contr'un. Montaigne insists that it is beautifully composed and if its author had lived and undertaken a long work of reflection, he would have created something memorable that would have made him comparable to authors of antiquity. But this Discours and a Commentary on the Edict of January2 are all he has available now, since he has already published all the other MSS left him by his friend's bequest.3 Montaigne admits that he has a special fondness for the Contr'un because it furnished the means of their first awareness of each other even before they met, thus opening the door to the perfect friendship between them. This relationship was so extraordinary that its like will not be seen more than once in three centuries.

Soon after the death of Lope de Vega in 1635 Calderón was recognized as the foremost playwright of Spain and of the pleasure-loving court of Philip IV. It was not long before Philip decided to bestow upon his protégé the coveted order of Santiago. Pope Urban VIII signed the pontifical dispensation on April 28, 1637, and from that day on Calderón wore the insignia of his newly acquired honor.1 But the rise of Calderón as a court dramatist had begun several years earlier when some of his plays were being produced in the Salón de las Comedias of the old alcázar.

It is generally recognized that during the central third of the sixteenth century there occurred a shift of thought so considerable as to place Ariosto and Tasso in two separate moments of intellectual history. The critical activity of the period was focussed upon the elaboration of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetic into a complex system of regulations; its poetic activity was characterized by the emergence of forms patterned on classical models. The most striking of these, because the most divergent from previous forms, is the ode.

Experimentation in prose rhythms is generally conceded to be a sign of mature literary art. It can not, in fact, be conceived to occur unless craftsmen in letters have become so far aware of their aesthetic medium—its physical basis and its principles—that they wish to subject it to deliberately planned tests for effect. The obvious meters of verse require much less awareness. Prose experiments appear characteristically within and just after periods of great artistic productivity, when a galaxy of creative writers has engendered the requisite literary self-consciousness. Such a period was surely the fourteenth century in England, and it should be a matter of no surprise if therefore several prose writers of the time adopted an attitude of experimentation.

The fourfold interpretation of Holy Writ or of other authoritative texts, through the technique of exegesis commonly known as allegorical interpretation, was a well known cultural phenomenon throughout the Middle Ages.3 The practice of allegorical interpretation itself was well developed in the Western world by the time of Plato,4 and the fourfold method may be regarded as a further refinement of this technique. It constituted a tradition of remarkable vitality: as late as the early fifteenth century we find Erasmus inveighing against its abuses in The Praise of Folly with as much emphasis as Dante had defended it in his famed letter to Can Grande in an earlier century. It was taught at the University of Paris during the Middle Ages5.

One of the most obscure and perplexing passages in the Estoire des Engleis is that in which its author, Gaimar, recounts confusedly some exploits of an otherwise unknown “Danish” king in East Anglia, whom he treats as a contemporary of Cynric and Ceawlin, of Wessex. The story, if such it can be called, shares with the Haveloc story, which precedes it, and with two other allusions, which follow it, a common political idea: that the Danes were settled in England, and held sway in that country, before the arrival of the Saxons. The passage also shares with the Haveloc episode in the Estoire the appearance of interpolation, for without it we have a reasonably smooth narrative based on the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (ASC).